"You know the stereotype of the
NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite.
It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah
Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru,
and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back.
As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve
covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during
most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were
nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those
who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the
distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh,
it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of
America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with
birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed
us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our
own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image
generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition
from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the
left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of
listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the
road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11
percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as
middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat
liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates
and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now,
predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news
outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all
things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off
with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at
NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly
voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But
what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired
president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with
Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we
hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam
Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR
hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those
conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff
talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of
collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our
programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story.
Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by
sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of
circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on
with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high
standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t
practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders
cynicism about the media.
Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive
report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop
containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only
weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news
at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories
that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and
readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian
disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials
suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his
connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and
its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic
instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting
with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded
journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it
could help Trump.
When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were
confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later,
we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we
didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.
Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most
notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal
aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story
lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis
that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other
side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan
lab.
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost
immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony
Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health
establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We
became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak
had been debunked by scientists.
But that wasn’t the case.
When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a
number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a
lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January
2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and
before fear spread and politics intruded.
Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive.
Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential
scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors
wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And
understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the
article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew
Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his
colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or
natural.”
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative
journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at
NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with
which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy
Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and
biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was
the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on
February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence
overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”
When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they
were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague
compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed
weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But
these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting
out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.
NPR editor Uri Berliner tells how the network lost
America's trust in The Free Press
Uri Berliner near his home in Washington, D.C., on April 5,
2024. (Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)
I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories
where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain.
Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to
truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step
inside the organization.
You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing
came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of
America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired
primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of
member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.
After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a
more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020.
It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for
NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation
and the daily operations at NPR.
Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have
been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive
activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement,
education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for
answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the
way.
But the message from the top was very different. America’s
infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given.
Our mission was to change it.
“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,”
Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening
and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by
constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for
this.”
And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem.
In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with
me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our
careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and
interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in
ourselves and our institutions.”
He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our
audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization.
Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more
casual conversation.
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect
of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed
their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it
in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training
sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start
talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and
“men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the
NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were
in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers,
reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee
resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex
People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR
Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR;
Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and
Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish
heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).
All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of
people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If,
as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to
meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would
have been one thing.
But the role and standing of affinity groups, including
those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union,
SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section
on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and
style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if
language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute
could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.
In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a
dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the
table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.
Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and
management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable
is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced
around the progressive worldview.
And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at
NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should
pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another
about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate
apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican
policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a
document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news
management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial
guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center
for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The
Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly
divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and
suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been
manipulated by white conservatives.
More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and
its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that
has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed.
That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn
while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas
intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to
the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.
For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source
of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of
American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.
I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone,
describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!”
And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their
favorite host or one of those “driveway moments” where a story was so good
you’d stay in your car until it finished.
It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the
conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and
a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some
chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”
In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question.
Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration
for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I
found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero
Republicans. None.
So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands
editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a
score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was
worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from
surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s
weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a
critical failure of our diversity North Star.
In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive
told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought when
she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this
publicly.”
For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our
coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news
leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10,
2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the
controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it
didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote
another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx.
On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my
observations.
Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me.
That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become
a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes
heartbreaking.
Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote
to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint
diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no
response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing
my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15,
the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our
conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward
to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.
I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened.
Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to
deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper
management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at
NPR and how that affects our journalism.
Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North
Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so.
Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected
America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive
silo.
Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our
news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In
2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was
black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent
black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic
adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to
reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered
around coastal cities and college towns.
These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year,
NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts
following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and
our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website
rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive
advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are
plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.
Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of
trouble at the most basic level: trust.
In February, our audience insights team sent an email
proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New
York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found
that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with
the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’ ” Only in a world where media credibility has
completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast
about.
With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an
audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not
promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it
will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of
journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations
don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be
the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.
Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn’t the answer. As
the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public
institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith.
Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR.
That needs to come from within.
A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher,
who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be
an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job.
Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could
even be the new North Star.
Uri Berliner is a senior business editor and reporter at
NPR. His work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward
R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award,
among others. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @uberliner."
